


Fragile as the Sky

by cloudymagnolia



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Nightmares, Stoick basically being a big teddy bear, three-shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 17:52:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3390743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudymagnolia/pseuds/cloudymagnolia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Astrid never wasted much energy worrying about what ifs or what could have beens. She was too practical; a warrior through and through, she preferred to focus on problems she could solve with the business end of her axe. </p><p>Which is why she was so surprised by the nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What Ifs

**Author's Note:**

> This story is very loosely inspired by sunflowerb's exceptional multi-chapter canon-divergence AU "Persephone" (and if you haven't read it, you should go do that right now). Her story got me thinking about just how close Hiccup was to leaving Berk in HTTYD -- which means I had to get Astrid thinking about it, too.
> 
> Three-shot, each chapter has a different POV.

Astrid never wasted much energy worrying about what ifs or what could have beens. She was too practical; a warrior through and through, she preferred to focus on problems she could solve with the business end of her axe.

Which is why she was so surprised by the nightmares.

They started just a week after Hiccup turned sixteen. The Saturday before his birthday, the two had gone on a long afternoon flight, circling the island, playing tag amidst the sea stacks, and winging up through the spun-sugar clouds until Astrid almost felt they could touch the sky. They finally came to rest in the cove, sitting together on a boulder, shoulders barely touching, as they watched the sun sink behind the tips of the trees, turning them to brushy silhouettes against a background of glorious orange.

“Toothless really seems to like it here,” Astrid said, as the magnificent light show in the sky began to fade into darkness. Toothless was bounding in the shallows of the pond, tongue lolling out, tail wagging in an exaggerated swagger as he enticed Stormfly to give chase.

“I know,” Hiccup said. Astrid glanced at him. His voice had been quiet and uncharacteristically sober, in stark contrast to the joy she had seen on his face all day.

“What’s up?” she asked, pressing closer to him when he didn’t say anything more.

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

Astrid stayed silent.

“It’s just…” Astrid hid her grin by turning her head to follow the progress of their dragons, who had abandoned their game of Chase in favor of the always-entertaining My Stick Not Your Stick. Hiccup was very predictable.

“I guess I’m surprised how happy Toothless is here. This must have felt like a prison to him, at first."

“You’re right. At first, it probably did.” Now that Astrid knew what it was like to fly, she couldn’t even imagine the pain of having it ripped away from her.

For a moment, Astrid wondered if she was going to need to give Hiccup another lecture on not letting himself get carried away with blaming himself. He was naturally compassionate -- a rare trait in a viking, and not one that was universally appreciated -- and Astrid sometimes wondered if growing up in his father’s shadow had made him feel like the world itself held him accountable for the well being of everyone and everything around him.

“Astrid?”

“Yes, Hiccup?”

“Do you ever think about how easily things could have gone wrong?”

“What do you mean?” She asked, placing a hand against the sun-warmed stone so that she could shift her weight to look him in the green of his eyes.

“Well… we’re all so happy now. I’m so happy now. But think about everything that had to happen for us to get here. It’s like a - a chain, or something. Break any link in the chain and we wouldn’t end up here.” Hiccup did that thing with his hands, gesturing all around them so that Astrid knew he didn’t mean here so much as here, sitting shoulder to shoulder, watching their dragons play.

“What if I hadn’t shot down Toothless? What if I hadn’t cut him free? What if I hadn’t learned to ride him? What if you hadn’t come to find me the day before my final exam? What if I hadn’t gone after you when you ran away? What if we hadn’t gone after my father, when he went after the Red Death?”

Astrid blinked. The conversation had taken a predictably unpredictable Hiccup turn, but as good as Astrid was at grounding her… her… -- What were they again? _Dear friend_ , she eventually settled on -- when he was overtaken by one of his flights of fancy, something he’d said had distracted her.

“What do you mean, if I hadn’t come to find you that day? Nothing would have changed.”

Hiccup shook his head, and an unfamiliar whisper of fear ghosted through her.

“I think I would have left.” His voice was soft. “I was all packed up and ready. I don’t think I would have been able to face the Kill Ring without you.”

Astrid swallowed.

“And when you saw Toothless and began to run away -- I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a second there. I think I finally went after you because I couldn’t bear the thought of you being afraid of him.”

Astrid looked down at where her right hand was curled in her lap, coarse from combat practice and flecked with scars. She took a shaky breath before remembering that she had nothing to say.

So she did what she always did in these situations.

“Ow!” Hiccup yelped, clasping a hand to his shoulder, but it was mostly for show and they both knew it. Astrid’s shoulder punches had been little more than love-taps for almost a year now -- something Hiccup had, wisely, never brought up in conversation with her or any of their friends. She had an image to maintain, after all.

“Come on,” she said, jumping down from their perch. “It’s almost dark. Plus, Broomhilda got grapes from Trader Johann this morning, and she promised she’d be giving some out at the Great Hall tonight. Last one there’s the decaying yak carcass!”

\---

The dream started out normally enough, for a nightmare. She was running through the forest, sliding through bracken and tripping over rocks, branches whipping against her face hard enough to draw blood. She felt something catch on the neat knotting of her braid, but kept right on running, without breaking her stride. She didn’t even blink or raise a hand when she felt a ripping against her scalp and a hunk of her hair fell away. She needed to keep running. She was being pursued by a shadowy, ravening beast, and she needed to keep running, or else.

She was getting closer to the village and the promise of safety; she put on a burst of speed. Her heart was pounding in her throat and her eardrums instead of in her chest.

She was nearly there -- she was closing in on the last crest of hill before the town came into view, when...

Nothing grabbed her from behind.

She didn’t understand why she woke up screaming.

It wasn’t until the third night that things began shifting into place.

She crested the hill, but this time she kept on running, down past the stairway hewn of stone that led to the Great Hall, down to the very first house in the sprawling heap of wood and thatch that was her village.

She burst through the door, not even bothering to knock, and doubled over, gasping, hands on her knees, in front of Stoick the Vast.

_“Sir!”_ she yelled, _“Sir, you’ve got to come quick, Hiccup’s keeping a Night Fury as a pet in the cove -- it attacked me, we have to go hunt it down -”_

She watched her chief’s eyes go wide, wide, impossibly wide, and then dark and dull, as if someone had extinguished their fire. He reached for his hammer.

_“Go rouse the other fighters and meet me in the square.”_

It was odd, she thought, even in the dream, that her running, stumbling journey to the village seemed to have taken so long, but the march back to the cove took mere seconds -- spanned just a few agonized flutterings of her heart.

But when they got there, the cove was empty.

Empty, save for a woven fish basket, Astrid’s forgotten axe, a plethora of dragon footprints, and Hiccup’s journal, filled with sketches of flight.

This time when she jerked awake, she was shrieking Hiccup’s name.

\---

Nightmares were common on Berk. Everyone got them. Even the most peaceful of summer nights was punctuated by the screams of warriors who had seen too much. Children got used to the noise; many even learned to find it soothing.

But when she came down to breakfast that morning, and saw the looks of understanding -- no, of pity -- reflected in her mother’s and her uncle’s eyes, she knew they’d heard whose name she’d cried out in the night.

She couldn’t exactly beat a nightmare into submission with her axe. She’d tried that on nightmares before, when she was younger, and it had never worked. So she taught herself to scream in silence, instead. Her throat was still raw when she jerked herself awake, but at least she didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing.


	2. Snowed In

“You know, when I was a kid I used to love blizzards,” Hiccup panted, struggling to keep up with the added weight of a full basket of salted fish strapped to his back. “Everyone crammed into the great hall together. They felt - whoops,” he stepped on a rock with his bad foot and had to struggle to keep his balance, “like a big party.”

“Aye, I liked ‘em too, as a boy,” his father said. He was carrying three baskets of fish on his back and had another in each arm, and was strolling casually through the square as if he didn’t even notice the weight.

Which he probably didn’t.

“They were like a day off. No one had anything to do except sing and tell stories. They have quite the festival air to ‘em, don’t they.”

Hiccup came to a stop, mouth hanging open in surprise, then had to rush to catch up. It always surprised him when his father told him something about his past, from the near-mythical time before he had been chief. It surprised him even more when it was about something that he and his father had in common.

“R-really?” Hiccup asked, something like wonder in his voice, and his father chuckled.

“Oh, aye. I think most children do.”

Neither of them said what they were both thinking. Now, with the responsibility of keeping the village fed and violence to a minimum during the storm, blizzards couldn’t be the treat they used to be for his father.

Their conversation lagged as they made their way up the stairs to the hall. Hiccup was gasping for breath before he was more than eight stairs up and had no air left over for conversation, and even his father looked like he had a sheen of sweat covering his forehead.

“O-kay,” Hiccup said, heaving a sigh of relief as he dropped his basket into the fish basin just inside the doors of the great hall. He paused to roll some feeling back into his shoulders. That had been the last trip he needed to make. He glanced around, automatically taking stock of their food.

The majority of their farm animals were here, crammed into their makeshift pen by the far wall. Next to it stood the jugs of milk, crates of eggs, and whatever vegetables they’d been able to scrounge from the fields, this early in the season. This was the second early blizzard they’d had in as many years, and he could tell it was making the older Vikings uneasy.  

Hiccup estimated that they had about a week’s worth of food in the hall. That would almost certainly be enough, although none of them knew how long they’d need to be holed up in here. Bucket’s bucket had given them almost five days’ worth of warning for the storm, but the tightening of the pail was a better indicator of what the blizzard’s severity would be like than of it’s duration. The one they’d had last year had lasted just one afternoon and the better part of the following night, but it had dumped four feet of snow on the village and destroyed more than a handful of houses with the force of its wind.

Hiccup scanned the hall for Toothless and found him in a dark corner, in a tight knot of other dragons. He was gurgling and crooning and making all sorts of faces at them, punctuating whatever he was doing by jerking his head up at the animal skins stretched near the ceiling, just below the rafters.

The animal skins had been Hiccup’s idea, after the last blizzard the villagers had spent cooped up in the great hall with their dragons. Surprisingly, space hadn’t been nearly as much of an issue as most of them had feared. Most of the dragons prefered to stay perched on the rafters, out of the Vikings’ way. Toothless and the other Academy dragons, who refused to leave their masters’ sides for more than a few minutes at a time, seemed to be the exception rather than the rule.

But they had lost a lot of their food stores to dragon droppings. Mildew had nearly started a riot.

Hiccup smiled. It almost looked like Toothless was explaining the skins to the other dragons, lecturing at the front of the class the same way that Hiccup did with the other dragon riders.

Then again, that might have been exactly what Toothless was doing. Fishlegs had become extremely interested in dragon communication over the past few weeks, both human-to-dragon and dragon-to-dragon. Some of his initial findings were startling, to say the least.

“Son?”

Hiccup moved to join his father and Gobber on the other side of the fish.

“It’s almost time to brace the doors against the storm,” Stoick explained as soon as Hiccup was near. “Now, it’s very important to ensure that everyone is here. Once the doors are shut, it’s a Hel of a time getting them open again. And more importantly, sometimes the wind in these storms can sound like knocking, and the people gets spooked unless they know everyone’s inside.”

“How do we make sure everyone is here?” Hiccup asked.

“We count them.”

“ _Count_ them?” Hiccup repeated. He looked around. The hall was full of Vikings milling around in a disordered throng. “How?”

“We ask the family heads if all of theirs are accounted for. Like this: Hofferson!” Stoick bellowed. Hiccup winced and clasped a hand over the ear facing his father just a second too late.

“Yes, Stoick?”

“Count your family and let me know if they’re all here.”

“Yes, Stoick.”

“And how do _they_ count them?” Hiccup asked, watching Fearless Finn duck into the crowd.

“By asking their wives or mothers or sisters to do it for them,” Gobber said.

Hiccup saw Fearless Finn approach Astrid and whisper something in her ear. She nodded, cracked her shoulder, and then bounded on top of the closest table.

“OKAY, LISTEN UP! EVERY HOFFERSON IN THIS HALL HAD BETTER HOLD STILL AND RAISE THEIR HANDS UNTIL I SAY YOU CAN PUT THEM DOWN, OTHERWISE I’LL USE YOUR HEADS FOR AXE-THROWING PRACTICE!” she roared.

All around him, Vikings of all ages raised their hands meekly towards the roof.

“Or nieces,” Gobber added.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Hiccup said.

They waited patiently for the counts to come back.

“Twenty-seven Hoffersons,” Fearless Finn reported.

“Twenty-two Jorgensons,” Spitelout said. Once his back was turned, Stoick glanced at Hiccup, who nodded. His father had made him perform an independent count of that particular family, just in case.

“Thirty-three Ingermans,” Urik, one of Fishlegs’s great-uncles, announced.

“Eighteen Thorstens,”

“Six Erikssons,”

“Nineteen Gunnarsons,”

“And two Haddocks,” his father finished, clapping a hand to Hiccup’s shoulder with enough force to make his knees buckle. “That makes everyone. Close the doors!”

The six burly Vikings who were on door duty gamely forced the giant, oaken doors shut, straining against the wind that was already beginning to pick up outside. The hinges popped and creeked as the doors were driven flush against each other and the bracing plank was dropped into place.

Belatedly, Hiccup realized that they had no way of knowing if all of the _dragons_ had gotten in safely. Granted, being gigantic, fire-breathing reptiles, a blizzard probably wouldn’t do them much harm -- but he made a note to himself to think about it before the next snowstorm.

“Well, there we are, son,” Stoick said, nodding in satisfaction towards the closed and barred doors. “I trust we can count on you to make sure none of the other dragon riders get up to any mischief?” He added, almost as an afterthought, when he’d already turned away and begun to head into the center of the hall.

“Oh, for the love of,” Hiccup groaned, clapping a hand over his eyes.

And that was how Hiccup ended up spending the evening shouting at the twins that _no_ , they could not tip the yaks in the animal pen, and _yes_ , everyone could see them when they tried to hide behind the pen’s posts; breaking up what promised to be a really _good_ fistfight over he- _really_ -didn’t-want-to-know between Astrid, Ruffnut, and -- uncharacteristically -- Fishlegs; and stopping Snotlout from bartering he- _also_ -really-didn’t-want-to-know-but-whatever-they-were-they-were-in-sacks to a crowd of increasingly rowdy villagers.

As he was helping Broomhilda, the Hallwife, dole out dinner to a line of hungry, restive Vikings, Hiccup found himself wondering when blizzards had stopped being fun for him, too.

Not a second too soon, Stoick ordered the torches doused, and the Vikings made their ways back to the clusters of bedrolls surrounding their families’ little fires. Hiccup heaved a sigh of relief. It couldn’t be much past eight o’clock, and he was exhausted.

Gratefully, he folded himself into his own bedroll. As the chief, Stoick felt it was his duty to take the least desirable spot in the hall, just in front of the doors, where the winter chill seeped into the hall through the cracks between wood and stone. At least his father’s bulk blocked most of the wind, he thought to himself as he leaned back against Toothless and pulled out his journal, sketching absentmindedly in the half light. And with his dragon curled around him like this, he felt practically warm.

Slowly but surely, the Vikings around him dropped off to sleep and began to fill the hall with snores. Even his father joined them, snoring so loud it made Toothless’s ears twitch and almost drowned out the sound of the wind outside.

Hiccup tried closing his own eyes a few times, but each time he did he’d hear a grumble, or rustle, or rattle that didn’t sound quite right and his eyes would jerk wide again.

He wondered if the tiny, niggling, ceaseless worry he held at the back of his mind these days was just part of growing up, and found himself missing his bed at home.

At what felt to be about midnight, Hiccup finally sighed, defeated, and sat up properly. He spent a few exciting moments getting to his feet, carefully working himself free of his dragon without waking him and of his blanket without getting caught in it.

He rolled his shoulders. Maybe a bowl of watered-down mead would help him fall asleep.

Almost all of the family fires had been doused by now. The center hearthfire had burned down to banked embers, but it was still giving off enough light to see by -- just barely. Hiccup followed the curve of the stone wall with his fingertips as he made his way to the other side of the hall. It would have been faster to go straight across, but then he would have had to navigate the sea of sleeping Vikings -- a prospect made even more perilous by his metal leg. It was safer to go around the outside; there was usually a clear perimeter near the walls, as the Vikings crowded inwards, towards the warmth of the hearthfire and away from the clammy chill of the stone.

The route he was taking had absolutely nothing to do with having seen Astrid lay out her bedroll somewhere around here earlier in the day. Absolutely nothing, whatsoever. That would be totally weird and inappropriate.

Still, he found himself scanning faces as he made his way past where the Hoffersons were sleeping. The only sound was the step _click_ , step _click_ of his feet against the stone. Who would have thought that 126 sleeping Vikings would be so quiet? It was a little creepy. It almost made him feel like a ghost.

His heart leapt into his throat and he almost yelped in surprise when the step _click_ he was expecting changed to a step _fwump_. He had been so engrossed in looking for Astrid that he had almost stepped on someone lying closer to the outer wall than most. Luckily he had just stepped on their blanket. Vikings weren’t exactly at their best when they were jerked awake.

He got to the table with the open mead barrel -- heavily watered-down, of course; no one would keep a barrel of _good_ mead out and unguarded in the center of a room full of Vikings -- and helped himself to a bowl. He began making his slow, careful way back around the edge of the hall.

But then his eye found Astrid, and he nearly dropped his bowl in surprise. Once he’d mastered the urge to yelp, he found himself rolling his eyes at his own clumsiness.

Of course Astrid would be the Viking he’d nearly _stepped_ on.

He allowed himself a moment to pause and trace her features with his eyes in the dim light. How much harm could it do? He was the only one awake, anyway, and he was sure she would look beautiful in her sleep, peaceful in a way that she never was when she was awake --

His train of thought derailed itself. Because she didn’t look peaceful. Or beautiful, for that matter. Her whole body was tense as a bowstring, her face contorted painfully. Her mouth was open wide, and the tendons in her neck were bulging.

Actually, it almost looked like she was screaming. Silently.

In her sleep.

Okay. _That_ wasn’t creepy at all.

He frowned and crouched next to her. She must be having a nightmare. His first instinct was to reach out a hand to shake her awake, but he stopped himself just in time.

Yeah, no. That was just what he needed: the whole village waking to Astrid’s war cry, with Hiccup leaning over her in the half light.

He couldn’t quite suppress the shudder that ran through him, just at the thought.

But he couldn’t exactly leave her like this, either -- not when she was in such obvious distress. He set his bowl down next to him and propped his chin in his hands, his elbow on his knees, and drummed his fingers against his cheek, considering. His best bet was probably to try and wake her gradually, to keep from startling her. He shifted his weight and reached out one careful, apprehensive hand. He was going for her shoulder. It was strange to see it without the shoulder guard. He’d only seen her shoulders uncovered a handful of times since they were kids.  

He stopped with his fingertips barely brushing against her skin and held his breath. He could almost _hear_ the time passing. Finally, when he was _mostly_ sure she wasn’t about to jerk awake with a blood-curdling yell and chop him with her axe, he slowly allowed his arm to relax, until the full weight of his hand was resting just to the left of her collarbone.

She didn’t wake up. Which was sort of good, since it meant he still wasn’t about to get his arm chopped off, but also kind of defeated the purpose of the entire exercise. He was about to try giving her the smallest and gentlest of shakes when he felt the clenched muscles beneath his hand relax. He watched as the contours of her face softened, and heaved a silent sigh of relief. The hand on her shoulder had been enough to break her out of her nightmare without having to wake her completely. He gave her shoulder the tiniest of squeezes before drawing his hand away.

Almost immediately, her face tensed and her body stiffened. She shifted in her sleep, hunching over as if trying to protect herself from an unseen attacker.

Hiccup frowned. Carefully, he replaced his hand.

She relaxed again.

He took it away.

She stiffened.

Hiccup sighed and put his hand back. Maybe he would just sit here like this with her for another few minutes. It wasn’t like he was tired, after all.

The way Astrid was sleeping, curled up next to the wall, he could just about keep his hand on her shoulder while leaning back against the stone.

Well, mostly. Or, almost. She was actually too far away for him to be able to lean all the way back. He had to kind of slouch down, so that in the end only his shoulders were pressed against the back wall. But that was okay. He would just have to be careful not to slide any further down the wall, otherwise he’d get a nasty crick in his neck.

The glow from the hearthfire was beginning to flicker, and his eyes felt very dry. But that was okay, too.

It’s not like he was tired.


	3. A Merry Heart

Stoick was usually the first of his tribe to wake in the morning, except sometimes for the very youngest of the village children and their weary parents.

Which is why he was surprised when he found Gobber shaking him awake, his one good hand pressed over his nose and mouth to muffle his shout.

“Gobber,” he hissed, as soon as he’d stopped struggling and Gobber had taken the hand away. “What are you doing? Is the storm over?”

Gobber nodded and brought his hook to his lips, shushing him.

Stoick’s heart sank. Gobber was grinning hugely. That almost always meant trouble.

“What are you so happy about?” he whispered. Gobber nodded at a space on the floor just behind him.

Stoick craned his neck to look around. A wave of pure terror crashed over him, and he groped around frantically for his hammer.

Hiccup’s bedroll was empty, and Toothless was nowhere in sight.

Gobber put a steadying hand on his shoulder just as Stoick wrapped his fingers around the handle of his hammer, and his terrified war cry died on his lips as his brain kicked back in.

Gobber was grinning. Gobber was grinning and Hiccup was missing, which still didn’t add up to anything good, but it did, at least, mean that Gobber knew where Hiccup was.

“Where is he?” he mouthed to his friend, hauling himself to his feet, rolling the kinks out of his shoulders, and placing his helmet on his head. Preparing himself to be Chief of Berk for the day.

Gobber pointed to the other side of the hall. Stoick followed his gaze, perplexed. Why would Hiccup be over by the mead table? He couldn’t be awake already, surely? That boy would sleep half the day away if it weren’t for his dragon, and even _with_ the dragon he sometimes did.

But then his eyes found the Hoffersons.

Stoick’s eyes went wide and his nostrils flared in anger. It wouldn’t be the first time that a teenager had gone to bed in their own bedroll and woken up in someone else’s, but he would be _damned_ if he wasn’t going to _flay that boy alive_ \--

Gobber elbowing him broke him out of planning exactly _how_ he was going to kill his son. He shot his friend a quick glance and had to resist the urge to swat him with his hammer. This was _serious_. So why, for the love of Thor, was _Gobber still grinning_?   

Slowly, the two of them walked along the outside edge of the hall, where no one ever slept, to get to the cluster of sleeping Hoffersons. Stoick wrapped himself in his anger and disappointment like a mantle. He’d always had trouble yelling at his son -- at his fragile, stubborn, miracle of a boy -- and he found it even harder now, after almost losing him to the Red Death.

After almost losing him to his own sheer yak-headed stubbornness.

But today, he swore to himself, he was going to give Hiccup the dressing-down of his life. He was going to _discipline_ him.

There the boy was, lying with Hofferson girl, just as he had expected. He stopped before them and drew himself up to his full height, ready to give his son the scare of his life when he nudged him awake with his boot...

And paused, nearly choking on his own righteous indignation.

Hiccup was lying next to the Hofferson girl, it was true. Astrid was curled in her bedroll, face turned towards Hiccup, looking more peaceful in sleep than she ever did awake. Hiccup was just beyond her, head propped against the wall at an odd angle. He would have Odin’s own crick in his neck when he did wake up.

But the thing that was causing Stoick’s face to break into a goofy smile the twin of Gobber’s was the fact that there had to be more than two inches of space between the two of them at their closest point.

Except for Hiccup’s left hand. That was just barely resting on Astrid’s shoulder, with Astrid’s own hand covering his.

And Toothless, predictably, was curled around the both of them, head near Hiccup’s shoulder and tail by Astrid’s feet.

Leave it to Hiccup to break the rules into tiny pieces by waking up next to a girl, and do it in the sweetest, most innocent way possible.

Toothless must have been able to sense their presence, because they had only been standing there a moment when he blinked his eyes open and looked up at the two of them sleepily. Stoick shot a glance at Gobber and winked, then looked back down at Toothless, pressing a single finger to his grinning lips. Toothless cocked his head, then shook it up and down in what almost could have been a nodding motion.

Thor help him, he had just told a dragon to shush. And what’s more, the dragon had _understood_.

Toothless carefully placed his head back on his front paws, almost as if he was feigning sleep. Stoick noticed that he kept his eyes half-open, though. It looked like even the dragon didn’t want to miss the fun.

Stoick squared his shoulders and carefully schooled his features back into the angry scowl he had been wearing a minute earlier. He made sure his eyes were wide, his nostrils flared.

Then he cleared his throat.

Hiccup stirred, but that was it.

He cleared his throat again.

This time Hiccup’s eyes began to flutter and he brought his free hand up to his face. He made a small groaning noise and opened his eyes.

Which then flew wide when he saw Stoick standing over him.  

He looked from his father down to Astrid, and then back up. Stoick could actually see his boy’s brain working by the panic in his eyes.

Stoick watched Hiccup’s face turn beet red, then bone white. He yanked his hand free -- and Astrid made an unhappy noise in the back of her throat, curling towards the missing warmth on her shoulder, and wasn’t that just the sweetest thing you ever did see? -- Stoick shook his head minutely and forced himself back to the task at hand.

Hiccup tried to scramble to his feet and ended up tripping over Toothless. Stoick reached out a hand to steady him. Halfway through, he decided to turn the motion into a grab and began dragging him around the perimeter of the hall back towards their bedrolls, mostly just for the appearance of the thing. He was supposed to be angry with his son, after all.  

Hiccup started whisper-babbling as soon as they were on the move. Stoick could tell that Gobber and Toothless were following a respectful distance behind.

“No, Dad, it’s not what it looks like, I swear, nothing happened, Astrid wasn’t even _awake_ \-- Oh, Gods _that_ sounded horrible, that isn’t what I meant -- I mean, I meant, I was having a hard time sleeping so I got up to get some mead and I saw her and it looked like she was having a nightmare, so--”

“Enough!”

They were back by the doors by now. Throughout the hall, vikings were beginning to stir.

“Enough, Hiccup,” he repeated.

“Oh, Gods, Dad, I’m sorry, I’m _so_ sorry, please tell me what I can do to make it up to you--”

All around them, Vikings were starting the serious morning business of putting on helmets, preparing breakfast, and sharpening their favorite weapons. Not a one of them spared either Hiccup or Stoick a second glance. This same conversation, or one very like, happened so often that it was hardly worth their notice.

“You can _start_ ,” Stoick said, cutting him off nearly mid-word, “by taking your dragon and starting to dig us out.”

He made a show of grabbing a shovel from the rack by the door and dropping it into Hiccup’s hands.

Hiccup nodded so hard it looked like his neck was in danger of snapping. He looked completely cowed. The Vikings on door duty were already beginning the arduous task of unbolting and pulling open the great doors. As soon as they were open far enough, Hiccup jumped on Toothless and was gone.

Stoick managed to hold it together until the two of them were only a speck in the sky before dissolving into laughter. Gobber came up next to him and joined in, too.

“He’ll be too afraid to touch her for a month,” Gobber said, wiping a tear away with his hook.

“Aye,” Stoick agreed, smiling fondly. “He’s a good boy.”

He turned around and surveyed his village. It was a good day to be Chief of Berk.

\---

(Astrid was never sure why, but after the blizzard she never had that nightmare again.)

 


End file.
